Shows
Mrigashira PodcastPankaj Mishra on innovation in media
Radha Radhakrishnan is in conversation with Pankaj Mishra, Journalist & Co-Founder, FactorDaily. They discuss innovation in media. What is stopping young journalists from being innovative and experimenting?
Pankaj Mishra is a Co-Founder of FactorDaily and host of Outliers podcast. He believes in humanizing technology, one story at a time. He has been tracking the tech industry for over 20 years now. He discusses innovation in media
The problem is not uncertainty the problem is lack of appetite for trying new things.Pankaj Mishra
SKIP TO: 00:15 Skip the Mrigashira intro.
SKIP TO: 00:36 Skip the gu...2021-07-1418 min
Splice PinkFactorDaily's Pankaj Mishra on pivoting to non-profit, and throwing out the media playbookFive years in, FactorDaily pivoted to a non-profit entity this year. Its cofounder Pankaj Mishra figured the change would allow him the freedom to stay closer to mission: "To make sense of technology’s impact on the society around us.""No ads. No paywalls. No venture capital funding," Pankaj proclaims on the website. That means some hard decisions on building new business models in an incredibly tough space.One more thing: Pankaj has also demolished the traditional news cycle. He and his team will only publish when there's a story.FactorDaily is the an...2021-06-2933 min
OutliersOultiers S05 E14 Lucky AliOultiers S05 E14 Lucky Ali by FactorDaily2020-08-0738 min
OutliersOutliers S05 E13: Nand Kishore ChaudharyOutliers S05 E13: Nand Kishore Chaudhary by FactorDaily2020-07-3151 min
OutliersOutliers S05 E12: Ajit IsaacOutliers S05 E12: Ajit Isaac by FactorDaily2020-07-2453 min
OutliersOutliers S05 E11: Aditi MittalOutliers S05 E11: Aditi Mittal by FactorDaily2020-07-171h 08
OutliersOutliers S05 E10: Dhimant and Anuradha ParekhOutliers S05 E10: Dhimant and Anuradha Parekh by FactorDaily2020-07-1036 min
OutliersOutliers S05 E09: Mitch GrassoOutliers S05 E09: Mitch Grasso by FactorDaily2020-07-0339 min
OutliersOutliers S05 E05 Ivan Zhao: How Notion WorksOutliers S05 E05 Ivan Zhao: How Notion Works by FactorDaily2020-06-2527 min
OutliersOutliers S05 E08 David Tibbitts: How Notion WorksOutliers S05 E08 David Tibbitts: How Notion Works by FactorDaily2020-06-2521 min
OutliersOutliers S05 E06 Akshay Kothari: How Notion WorksOutliers S05 E06 Akshay Kothari: How Notion Works by FactorDaily2020-06-2555 min
OutliersOutliers S05 E07 Camille Ricketts: How Notion WorksOutliers S05 E07 Camille Ricketts: How Notion Works by FactorDaily2020-06-2537 min
Outliers"If you have made mistakes, don’t carry that baggage forward."Gaurav Taneja, aka Flying Beast, is an outlier in the social media world for many reasons. First, he’s a professional airline pilot who worked with Air Asia until last week, before he turned a whistleblower revealing the airline’s security malpractices. Tune in to this podcast to learn life lessons from flying and being a social media influencer.2020-06-1934 min
Outliers“The ideology spectrum is like a horseshoe magnet: both the ends are similar”In this episode of Outliers podcast, I discussed a range of topics with Dhruv, from growing up to the thinking behind his selection of topics and his science fiction view of the world going forward.2020-06-1246 min
OutliersWhen you break out of resistance you always come out strongerIn this episode, I talk to Jav Vijayan talks about some amazing, deep insights from Jay about life and work, and what makes Tesla and Elon Musk great.2020-06-051h 02
OutliersRahul Vohra of Superhuman on Product Building Blocks and the Future of EmailTune in to this episode of Outliers to learn more about Superhuman’s product journey, and how Rahul is navigating the ongoing pandemic as an entrepreneur.2020-05-2945 min
OutliersOutliers Special Ep14: Season 4 Finale with Anand DeshpandeAnand Deshpande has navigated Persistent over the past three decades through different cycles of disruptions and existential crises. He’s an outlier for many reasons. And creating a software product focused company when everyone around was busy building immensely lucrative software outsourcing business in the 90s, isn’t the only reason. Over the years, Anand has built Persistent into a well-oiled machine that continues to survive and keep its focus intact, sometimes doggedly.2020-05-2231 min
OutliersOutliers Special Ep 13: Tanmay BakshiOutliers Special Ep 13: Tanmay Bakshi by FactorDaily2020-05-1544 min
OutliersOutliers Special Ep 12: Mehak GargOutliers Special Ep 12: Mehak Garg by FactorDaily2020-05-1428 min
OutliersOutliers Special Ep11: Adya SatapathyOutliers Special Ep11: Adya Satapathy by FactorDaily2020-05-1327 min
OutliersOutliers Special Ep09: “The strongest bonded teams are teams that go into a battle”In this episode of the Outliers podcast, I asked Rajan to share some of his learnings from watching the founders fight the battles they do, and how they can navigate the pandemic.2020-05-0834 min
OutliersOutliers Special Ep10: “Have an insanely optimistic belief about the distant future”In this conversation with Amit Somani, you will learn about how to be watchful about different biases while making decisions or navigating a crisis. He talks about one of such techniques called “Invert, always Invert” from Charlie Munger, co-founder of Berkshire Hathaway.2020-05-0828 min
OutliersOutliers Special Ep 07: “Pain is inevitable, but suffering is optional”In this episode of Outliers: Season of Resilience, I bring you an hour long conversation about how Girish is navigating the ongoing pandemic for his startup, and himself as a founder.2020-05-0138 min
OutliersOutliers Special Ep 08: “How do we explain our place in the universe?”Deep Nishar is among the most admired product builders, having created impactful products at Linkedin, Google among many companies. He’s now Softbank’s senior managing partner based in Mountain View, California.
Listen in to know how’s he reading the ongoing pandemic?2020-05-0142 min
OutliersOutliers Special Ep06: “Time to reflect who are you as a company”I speak with William for this week’s podcast, he reiterated FabIndia’s focus on standing by its community of craftsmen and women, and the employees, even during the ongoing pandemic.
“For the first time, truly the first time, in human history, it’s an event that affects every single person on the planet,” he tells me.2020-04-2426 min
OutliersOutliers Special Ep 04: “Hope is not a strategy”For Ashwini Asokan, co-founder and the CEO of AI startup Mad Street Den, fears of her startup’s “death is a distraction.”
“Hope is not a strategy. I truly believe that death is a distraction, sooner or later everybody dies, sooner or later all companies die and it’s a question of when, it’s never a question of if and it’s a distraction and it’s the same for companies,” Ashwini tells me in this episode of the Outliers.2020-04-1735 min
OutliersOutliers Special Ep 03: “I make peace with the worst possible outcome of every single thing I do”In this week’s Outliers podcast, I bring you another candid conversation with Nithin Kamath, the founder of Zerodha who has disrupted some of India’s biggest banks and financial services companies with his innovative and bold approach. Add to that his bootstrapped startup journey, which illustrates how to build a company that matters without raising monies from a VC.2020-04-1043 min
OutliersOutliers Special Ep 02: “Crisis is a self-discovery process.”Manish is a battle-hardened entrepreneur who has steered his startup Printo through many crises, including the last existential crisis triggered by the Lehman collapse post-2008. In the entrepreneurial ecosystem, he is looked upon as a bold voice of realism and honesty. Not false hope.2020-04-0341 min
OutliersOutliers Special Ep 01: “Hobson’s choice of saving lives versus livelihoods."Over the next few weeks, I intend going back to some of these Outliers (and some new voices), sit down with them for deeper conversations about how they managed different cycles of disruptions and crossed the valleys of death in their lives and careers -- basically, look how their experiences in the past can help us navigate the coming few months or quarters.
The first in this series is a conversation with Ravi Venkatesan, the former chairman of Microsoft India, who has worked across the sectors of manufacturing, technology and now social over the past few decades.2020-03-2740 min
OutliersOutliers 100: Life lessons from AR RahmanA.R. Rahman is one of those Outliers who, having charted a unique path of their own and spread their magic along the way, hardly need an introduction. His genius lies not just in his creative melodies but in seeking out all that is ‘good’. In music, in life, in other human beings.
Produced by Anand Murali
Music Credit: www.accelerated-ideas.com/2019-07-1530 min
OutliersMeet former entrepreneur Raju Reddy, now a startup ecosystem builderRaju Reddy of Sierra Atlantic talks about his entrepreneurial journey, and how the underground nerve center of BITS Pilani network – he's an alumnus and currently the chairman of BITSA – works.
Produced by Anand Murali
Music Credit: www.accelerated-ideas.com/2019-07-0846 min
OutliersCavinKare's C K Ranganathan on building a culture that lastsC K Ranganathan of Cavinkare talks about starting up and his journey building one of India’s best homegrown retail brands.
Produced by Anand Murali
Music Credit: www.accelerated-ideas.com/2019-07-0147 min
OutliersHow Ritesh Arora turned BrowserStack into a $60m rocket shipRitesh Arora talks about how he learned from failures to bootstrap, and then turn BrowserStack into a $60m rocket ship.
Produced by Anand Murali
Music Credit: www.accelerated-ideas.com/2019-06-1044 min
OutliersWilliam Bissell of Fabindia on building brand, lessons from the journey“Giving just returns to your investors and shareholders is a restrictive model for business. Business is such a powerful force, it needs to stand for a higher purpose,” Bissell tells me in this episode of Outliers.
Produced by Anand Murali
Music Credit: www.accelerated-ideas.com/2019-06-0340 min
OutliersWhy Environment, Sustainability are hot for Amuleek Singh of Chai PointListen to Amuleek Singh of Chai Point talk about some never-told, amazing back stories about Chai Point’s innovative packaging, business strategy, and organization culture.
Produced by Anand Murali
Music Credit: www.accelerated-ideas.com/2019-05-2754 min
OutliersHow Vinoth Chandar of ChuChu TV made it a top global brand on YouTubeVinoth Chandar, founder and CEO of ChuChu TV, talks about his journey and building a successful global YouTube company with over 24.5 Billion views and more than 38 Million subscribers across its channels.
Produced by Anand Murali
Music Credit: www.accelerated-ideas.com/2019-05-2044 min
OutliersSebastian Thrun on flying cars and solving today’s problemsSebastian Thrun, the Google X founder and among the world’s top AI and robotics scientists, flying cars are no more science fiction. In this episode of the Outliers podcast, he talks about flying cars and solving today’s problems
Produced by Anand Murali
Music Credit: www.accelerated-ideas.com/2019-05-1322 min
OutliersKishore Biyani on his survival lessons for the futureKishore Biyani talks about his rollercoaster ride of an entrepreneurial journey and his latest ammunition to fight his business battles - a combination of his customer base and technology-powered data insights for making decisions.
Produced by Anand Murali
Music Credit: www.accelerated-ideas.com/2019-05-0630 min
OutliersHow Nandan Nilekani brings people together to create lasting impactNandan Nilekani - cofounder of Infosys, the brain behind Aadhaar and India’s recent financial platforms, including “the IndiaStack.” - talks about his playbook for building things and how he builds them to create impact at scale.
Produced by Anand Murali
Music Credit: www.accelerated-ideas.com/2019-04-2924 min
OutliersGuneet Monga’s journey producing next gen movies in a world ruled by the incumbentsGuneet Monga of Sikhya Entertainment talks about her journey producing next gen movies in a world ruled by the incumbents.
Produced by Anand Murali
Music Credit: www.accelerated-ideas.com/2019-04-2249 min
OutliersIndia’s first man in space, Rakesh Sharma, on how keeping a low profile has been liberatingThe first Indian in space, Rakesh Sharma, talks about his journey becoming an airforce test pilot, going to space, and life after space.
Produced by Anand Murali
Music Credit: http://www.accelerated-ideas.com/2019-04-0545 min
OutliersEp 87: NDTV's Ravish Kumar ‘I'm the only one in Delhi...to say the Prime Minister lies’Journalism’s biggest existential battle isn’t about fighting the business model disruption or the way new consumers of news are behaving. It’s the war against intense polarisation and biases plaguing the newsrooms. There’s extreme negativity on one hand and excessive cheerleading on the other. For those in journalism staying true to the craft and following the principles of objectivity and the good old world balance, it’s a tough battle.
Amid all this chaos, Ravish Kumar is a rarity who practices fundamentals of journalism by pursuing.
How does he stay this way? And why? And what’s the cost of...2018-12-1438 min
OutliersEp 86: Phanindra Sama on how entrepreneurship is a self purification processOver past few years, and especially as a rookie entrepreneur myself, a lot of what Phani said and did have started making sense. After the exit, he took his mother to London, her maiden foreign trip. Phani tells me now in this podcast that she’s not in a shape now to travel overseas.
And his thoughts about how entrepreneurship is a self purification journey cannot be more relevant at a time when debates about a crisis of culture and integrity are at centre of India’s start ecosystem.2018-11-2849 min
OutliersEp 79: Tarun Mehta on the importance of keeping to your core visionEntrepreneurship is hard. No matter what you’re building. It becomes even harder when you’re building something that’s not understood by many, and even worse if the product is clearly ahead of its time.
But founders are crazy. They see opportunities when no one sees them. They also get blinded sometimes by it and fail.
When Tarun Mehta started building Ather Energy, India’s first electric two wheelers, his startup was being written off even before the pre-orders started.
After getting his pitch rejected by 80 investors ( is that a magic number? Even Kabeer of Dunzo had similar number of rejec...2018-11-2344 min
OutliersEp 78: Masterclass with Ashish GuptaAshish Gupta is an outlier for many reasons. A gold medalist in computer science from IIT Kanpur, Gupta built a startup (Junglee) and sold it to Amazon, has been through several near death experiences at his second startup (Tavant), and is now in the process of sunsetting his third entrepreneurial venture, Helion.
None of the above make him an outlier though.
Over years, Ashish has found a way into some of India’s biggest and most valued startups as an angel investor. From MakeMyTrip, to Flipkart and MuSigma, Gupta has been an early seed stage backer. It’s almost like gett...2018-11-0937 min
OutliersEp 77: Ananth Narayanan, CEO, Myntra on protecting “the founder’s mentality”India’s booming startup ecosystem has been mostly about the founders and the investors writing cheques to fund their ideas. But building a startup takes a lot more than just founders and investors. It takes exceptionally talented individuals who take the leap of faith to become part of these startup journeys as employers.
And while these professionals may not be the founders, they are highly entrepreneurial.
In this week’s Outliers Podcast I sat down with former McKinsey consultant Ananth Narayanan who’s been the CEO of Myntra since October 2015. What sets him apart as an outlier is his deep passio...2018-11-0226 min
OutliersEp 76: Mettl’s Ketan Kapoor: ‘I think it is inevitable to be an entrepreneur and not fail’So who is the quintessential Indian entrepreneur? This is the question we keep asking while analyzing success and failure of Indian startups. On one hand, large scale platforms such as Flipkart and Ola have high profile founders at the helm, always grabbing the headlines. On the other hand, a bunch of low key, reticent and enterprise focused startups such as Mettl continue to create impact in the niches they serve.
When Mercer acquired Mettl few weeks ago for $40 million, it didn’t make splashy headlines. And while you would have read the stories by YourStory and The Ken, there’s alwa...2018-10-2628 min
OutliersOutliers 75: Sandhya Menon on life beyond hashtags for India’s #MeTooWhy are there hardly any women in top roles in Indian newspapers and magazines? The answer is the same for most business sectors and organizations. These companies have sexual predators lurking around at the workplaces who make sure the bright women don’t rise up the ranks, especially if they don’t succumb to their demands. Yes. It’s that bad. And if you feel this is an exaggeration, please read the stories shared by top women journalists on social media over the past few weeks.
This week’s Outliers Podcast is with Sandhya Menon who triggered a revolution on Twitter a...2018-10-1221 min
OutliersEp 74: Balaraman Ravindran on what AI really means for IndiaI first learned about IIT Madras professor Balaraman Ravindran when my colleague wrote this profile story titled “Wizard of AI: Meet India’s foremost reinforcement learning expert.”
Since then, I’ve met him a few times. It’s fascinating how conversations with AI researchers go beyond technologies and tools shaping AI. It quickly becomes philosophical and even ideological while discussing the ills of machine learning systems making decisions impacting humans and society.
And this is where professor Balaraman starts making sense in the over-hyped and often “skin deep AI” ecosystem in India. AI is the new buzzword for policymakers, startups, VCs and indivi...2018-10-0531 min
OutliersOutliers 73: 80+ investors said no to Kabeer before he raised funding from Google“The biggest investment you make in a startup is your time; it’s not capital or anything else.” The first big lesson for Kabeer Biswas, from his first startup Hoppr is that entrepreneurship is more about the time than anything else.
Biswas, who co-founded Dunzo, is potentially building the next unicorn, or the startup with over billion dollar valuation. But that’s not what makes him and Dunzo outliers.
“Our mission is to go ahead and say we’re going to make cities more convenient and we’re going to make sure that every store in the city can be transacted wit...2018-09-2841 min
OutliersEp 72: Indus Khaitan on the curse and joy of entrepreneurship“What can I do that I haven’t done in the past, or trained for?”
At 44, Indushekhar Khaitan has been an entrepreneur, a VC and a corporate executive. Khaitan’s journey across these assignments was triggered by the restlessness to do something he had not done before. And that meant long, painful journeys apart from discovering what he’s good at, and what he’s not.
“We had no idea what venture investing was when we started Morpheus. We didn’t even know we had to set aside 2 per cent as the management fee for our salaries etc.,” he says.
“Now that I piece it...2018-09-2143 min
OutliersEp 71: Arpita Kapoor of Mech Mocha on making “India play games”“If I wasn’t running a startup, I wouldn’t be the person I am today.”
If there’s one thing most of the entrepreneurs will agree as the biggest influence while building their startups, it’s the personal transformation they go through.
For Arpita, who comes from a small village called Pihani near Lucknow, the capital of Uttar Pradesh, growing up was all about watching how generations of Indians were relying on mobile screens for everything from entertainment to business.
At 27, she now runs Mech Mocha, backed by both Accel Partners and Blume Ventures. (Both are among FactorDaily’s backers, too...2018-09-1435 min
OutliersEp 70: Sunit Singh on designing CleartripAmid India’s smartphone boom and the rise of large consumer internet companies such as Flipkart, Myntra and several others, profitability and funding rounds have dominated the narratives.
Designing these consumer products, creating engaging user interfaces hasn’t really made any big headlines, though.
Cleartrip, with its simple, uncluttered mobile web interface, has been an outlier on the design front. When most rival travel websites were busy packing their sites with innumerable features and deals, Cleartrip chose to doggedly keep its focus on a simple user interface when it launched in 2006.
“We said, 'Who is on mobile, and who are we des...2018-09-0736 min
OutliersEp 69: Dr Gullapalli Nageswara Rao on shaping eye care with compassion, disruptive tech“Always remember the poor who gave their bodies for you to learn medicine. You owe it to them.”
Every time a new batch of ophthalmologists joins LV Prasad Eye Institute in Hyderabad, its founder Dr Gullapalli Nageswara Rao tries to instill a sense of empathy for India’s poor. “The rich didn’t even let you touch their bodies for research. It’s the poor...”
Dr Rao has been able to combine world class healthcare with compassion in his career. In three decades, his institute has treated over 20 million patients, with nearly half of them availing the services for free. (The institute...2018-08-3128 min
OutliersOutliers 68: Anu Acharya of Mapmygenome on being called a woman entrepreneurAnu Acharya, the founder of bioinformatics startup Mapmygenome, comes from a traditional “Marwari” family but not a business household. She grew up in Bikaner in a family of academicians.
“I learned the value of money early in life.”
When Acharya came up with the idea to do a bioinformatics startup in 1998, there wasn’t even a Google to find out if there were more such startups existing already.
“The human genome project was about to get completed, but there were no early results,” she says.
“As an entrepreneur, you always say this will ultimately work and that’s despite others calling it a usele...2018-08-2430 min
Shunya OneFeat. Pankaj Mishra: Tech Journalism and Podcasting / The Dark Side of TechnologyOn this episode of Shunya One, we are joined by Pankaj Mishra, Writer and Co-founder at Factor Daily. This episode gives a perspective about the various aspects of covering technology in India and we find out what led Pankaj to build and launch the tech journalism platform, Factor Daily https://factordaily.com/ and the podcast: Outliers https://factordaily.com/podcasts/. Tweet to Pankaj @pankajontech , Shiladitya @shiladitya and Amit @doshiamit for your questions or reactions to this episode! To join the Shunya One slack channel, request for an invite here: http://ivmpodcasts.com/shunyaone Listen to t...2018-08-2144 min
OutliersEp 67: Amit Bhawani of PhoneRadar on fighting fanboy temptations to stay honest with the userHow can you be a fanboy and a reviewer of the product at the same time?
How can you expect consumer technology product makers to give you their latest gizmos for early reviews if you’ve called their last release “not worth the buy”?
I’ve always been fascinated by the world of technology product reviewers and curious about how well can they serve the massive community relying on their recommendations before buying anything.
It’s a world where the likes of Walt Mossberg and David Pogue have battled the dilemmas of fanboy versus independent reviewer.
For this episode of Outliers...2018-08-1726 min
OutliersWhy Zoho exists: Sridhar VembuIn June this year, we broke away from the mould to bring you companies, not just people, that are outliers with How AngelList works. If there’s one thing common in most of the companies that appear outliers, it’s their founders. From Steve Jobs to Elon Musk and even Jeff Bezos, the founder’s mentality continues to shape Apple, Tesla and Amazon. These founders are almost inseparable from their companies.
I first discovered Zoho, the cloud software company, in 2010 when I wrote this story about how it was hiring talent from unconventional places. Sridhar Vembu, the Zoho founder who we hos...2018-08-0347 min
OutliersInside the Zoho apps: Rajendran Dandapani“There was a time when Zoho was talked about as an engineering company, even today it’s an engineering company. User interface design was done by engineers, too. But over time, things changed,” Dandapani says.
“Today, we started realising that individual brilliance isn’t enough. … a couple of months ago, one of our customers said, 'Every one of your interface is good, but why do they look different?’”
“So now we are back on the drawing boards.”2018-08-0318 min
OutliersInside Zoho University: Revathy Durairajan“When the six of us joined, we knew where a computer keyboard is and mouse is, that’s all. Later we were taught programming here as part of 18 months training,” she says.
“I come from a very poor family,” Durairajan adds.
Durairajan now leads iOS development for some of Zoho’s software products including Zoho Recruit.
“My professor in school used to tell us you should aim to work at Google and Yahoo. But Zoho is now competing with Google, so why to go there?”2018-08-0306 min
OutliersHow Zoho builds products: Shailesh Kumar Davey“Our engineering department is like Rahul Dravid -- scores slow but steady. I even call this a Dravidian phase of development, not because we are based in south India -- I dedicate it to Rahul Dravid. The engineering is more tuned towards that approach,’ he says.
“All of us agree that making products is like preparing for a movie release. So, out of the ten movies you make, two of them will be superhit and others not so successful. Success of a product is based on how many people pay for it. Each of our service teams across 40 product lines are aw...2018-08-0336 min
OutliersEp 65: Nikhil Pahwa on fighting India’s internet battles, being an angry young manNikhil Pahwa is an angry young man.
But that doesn’t make him an outlier. Pahwa, 37, channelises that anger to build and scale mainstream movements such as the net neutrality campaign against Facebook’s FreeBasics in India more than two years ago.
So what’s the source of all the anger and sense of activism? It’s Pahwa’s deep need for freedom of the internet.
“The need for freedom led me to activism, entrepreneurship...I don’t know where it will take me next but freedom is central to everything I do,” he says.
“My mission is to build an internet ecosys...2018-07-2757 min
OutliersEp 64: How Infosys founder Narayana Murthy makes decisionsDepending who, just the mention of Infosys founder N. R. Narayana Murthy’s name will evoke strong views. Ever since he co-founded Infosys in July 1981, he’s shaped the company with some strong decisions. From walking away from customers such as General Electric, which accounted for over a quarter of Infosys’ revenues in 1995, to making a comeback in June 2013 as the executive chairman --Murthy’s decisions have been bold and at times considered everything from being foolish and old-worldly to self fulfilling.
If there’s one thing that even his biggest critics agree with his loyalists, it’s the issue of corporate...2018-07-2032 min
OutliersEp 63: Sanjay Parthasarathy on how running taught him patience as an entrepreneurEntrepreneurial journeys mean different things to different founders. For some, it’s a way of creating wealth. Many others do it to achieve their “change the world” ambitions. But at its core, entrepreneurship brings a deep personal transformation. Past Outliers episodes with Kailash Katkar, Aneesh Reddy, Manav Garg and K Vaitheeswaran are among conversations that underscore the personal transformation of entrepreneurs while building their startups.
For Sanjay Parthasarathy, a Microsoft veteran who quit the company to build Indix, an AI-powered catalog for all of the world’s products available online, entrepreneurship is all about patience.
And what taught him patience? Running...2018-07-1332 min
IVM DailyIVM Daily Ep. 101: RIP Spectacular Steve DitkoOn today's episode Abbas talks about comic book legend Steve Ditko who passed away last month. Joining him for the conversation is T. Gautham Shenoy, Shenoy is an avid reader, comics fan and writer of India’s longest running weekly column on science fiction called **New Worlds Weekly** (https://factordaily.com/tag/new-worlds-weekly/), on FactorDaily. They talk about Ditko's lasting legacy on pop culture, his abstinence of the limelight and his philosophy. You can follow Shenoy on twitter **@TheBekku** (https://twitter.com/thebekku?lang=en) Tweet to us using #IVMDaily. Our Twitter handle is @ivmpodcasts....2018-07-1216 min
OutliersEp 62: "CIS is like the Kamasutra... a collection of many positions," says Sunil AbrahamSunil Abraham of the Centre for Internet and Society (CIS) has been a digital warrior much before online privacy and data security became fashionable battles to fight in India. Abraham founded CIS in 2008 and established the organization as an important voice for explaining privacy in the social, digital age in India.
Over past decade, Abraham has questioned projects -- most famously, Aadhaar. Many in the country, especially those in the technology ecosystem, have found him difficult to comprehend. And that has a lot to do with the ironies he lives with. For instance, despite being a vocal critic of Aadhaar...2018-07-0646 min
OutliersEp 61: Sameer Gandhi shares lessons from the startup journeys of Dropbox, Spotify and DJIWhat do Dropbox, Spotify and DJI have in common? Great founding teams, obsessive focus on details and, of course, their core products.
Another common factor across these and several other successful companies of this decade is venture investor Sameer Gandhi who’s now a partner at Accel. (Disclosure: Accel India is the lead investor in SourceCode Media, the owner of FactorDaily).
Over past two decades, Gandhi has had the front row seats in some of the most important startups. He’s also sat through “the situation room” at these companies.
“Founders are the spiritual core of their startups,” he says.
Successful f...2018-06-2942 min
OutliersInside Product Hunt: Ryan HooverIn March this year, we published an Outliers podcast with Ryan. it also gives you a sense of how long we’ve been working to get these conversations:). We’re sharing it again as part of “How AngelList works” story to give you a complete inside view.
In many ways, Product Hunt completes AngelList’s quest to become the one-stop platform to help startups focus on their core product and not bogged down by funding, hiring needs.
From a small email list launched in November 2013 by Ryan Hoover, Product Hunt has now helped discover over 100 million products with more than 100,000 new produc...2018-06-2135 min
OutliersInside AngelList: Kevin LawsWith Naval becoming the chairman and moving away from day to day running of AngelList, Laws has perhaps the toughest job in the startup investment world. For many, it’s difficult to even think of anyone else as the face of AngelList. It’s a challenge that Naval himself recognizes.
Globally, AngelList moves about $175 million every year into startups, which is about 600-700 startups annually. And more than have of them use AngelList for their hiring too, according to Laws.
“There is a misperception that we make it easier for startups to raise money. Not any more likely that you will g...2018-06-2118 min
OutliersInside engineering at AngelList: Sumukh SridharaMost organisations have separate engineering, product and business teams. At AngelList, engineers are the owners of the product too. When AngelList started building out a product for India, Sridhara led the product development.
“That doesn’t mean you have to do all that (product, business, legal) all by yourself, but it’s pretty much like running your own company,”says, Sridhara, a University of California, Berkeley graduate in computer science.2018-06-2122 min
OutliersInside AngelList’s future: Naval RavikantOrganisations, like people, can be outliers too.
Since December 2016, I have had conversations with 59 individual outliers; a journey where me and hopefully you too, have learned with each episode.
With this episode of Outliers podcast, we’re kind of breaking away from the mold and expanding these conversations to companies and organizations that are outliers in the way they behave, their mission, and so on.
AngelList has been an outlier from the start in February 2010 when Naval Ravikant along with his co-blogger at Venture Hacks Babak Nivi, started with a group of investors.
“AngelList was started to help startups with thei...2018-06-2127 min
OutliersEp 59: Kailash Katkar on his journey from slums in Pune to India’s largest antivirus sw companyWhen he was 19 years old, Kailash Katkar started fixing calculators and even drew screen paintings for living. Then, one day, he saw a computer for the first time while repairing calculators at a bank.
“I asked what’s inside the glass walls and why was it air conditioned. They said it was to keep the computer cool,” he recollects.
That encounter changed everything for Katkar, especially after learning that the computers were soon to replace calculators among several other jobs.
In the age when the ability to learn new skills is considered the most important capability for anyone seeking to build...2018-06-0841 min
OutliersEp 58: Harsh Mariwala of Marico on his biggest failures and what he learned from themThis isn’t the first time we’re discussing entrepreneurial journey and how it’s lonely, and filled with failures and self doubt.But unlike the do’s and don’ts in entrepreneurship dished out byexperts and mentors who have absolutely no experience in building anything.
When a veteran entrepreneur such as Harsh Mariwala openly shares his biggest entrepreneurial failures and how he handles critique, the insights are far more valuable.
“I can talk about my failures all this podcast,” he says.
As for wealth, Mariwala calls himself a caretaker of all he’s earned in his career. “The first 25 years are about le...2018-06-0122 min
OutliersEp 57: Aneesh Reddy of Capillary on being a bully“Things became so bad around 2012 that one of my co-founders came to me and said I was bullying everyone around,” Aneesh Reddy, co-founder of Capillary Technologies, told me while recording this episode of Outliers podcast.
With over Rs 60 crore in the bank raised from investors such as Sequoia and a secondary share sale of around $5 million (more than Rs 26 crore then), Reddy, then 25, became his own biggest enemy.
“With all that, it (money and success) starts getting to your young mind,” he told me. I first heard about Aneesh’s journey at fixing his bully image over a year ago.
His boldne...2018-05-2524 min
OutliersEp 56: Ravi Venkatesan asks people to stop looking for jobs, focus on timeless skillsAfter quitting his job as Microsoft India chairman, Ravi Venkatesan spent few months working with a core team of former colleagues on a startup idea. Just before an investor was about to write a cheque, he realized he wasn’t passionate enough and backed out. It was the second time he was bitten by the startup bug in his career.
“Let’s say I had gone ahead and flamed out, so what, what’s the big deal? In the cosmic scheme of things, these don’t matter. What matters is you live a fulfilling life, you figure out the way you’re rea...2018-05-1840 min
OutliersEp 55: Uday Kotak keeps awake every night wondering whether he will have the bank next morningAt 59, Uday Kotak banks on his over three-day decades old business acumen in the financial services world for building the future, and keeps awake at night wondering if he will have his bank the next morning. For incumbent entrepreneurs such as Kotak, the forces of technology disruption are not science fiction anymore. In this episode of Outliers, i sit down with Kotak, who combines the old world business acumen with a sense of paranoia for the future in a way that very few leaders do. What makes him an outlier is his hunger to learn the new, new thing and...2018-05-1129 min
OutliersEp 54: No to social media, meetings at 7.30 am, embracing “human and interpersonal networks”The first time I heard about Gourav Jaswal was some time in 2003-2004 when I was early in my career and working with technology media group, Jasubhai Digital Media.
“You must meet him,” Maulik Jasubhai, the group’s CEO had told me while hiring me. And then there were legends about how Jaswal would turn obscure ideas and aimless pursuits into meaningful and impactful journeys.
Finally, I met him few weeks ago when he walked into FactorDaily office one afternoon.
Over past few years, he’s been running Prototyze, a new age business incubator.
Jaswal is not on WhatsApp, Facebook, Twitter...2018-04-1340 min
OutliersEp 53: Manav Garg on learning from his father’s entrepreneurial failures, building EkaManav Garg is clearly an outlier in the Indian startup ecosystem. Coming from Moga, a town in Punjab, Garg conquered his inability to speak English and fear of failure to set a launchpad for himself. Also, he never went to an IIT.
After finishing his graduation from the Indian Institute of Foreign Trade, Garg joined G Premjee Trading on its commodities desk starting with coffee in 1998. From around $50 million worth of trading, he became part of the team that scaled it to over half a billion dollars in three years.
Later, in 2001, Garg started building Eka. He’s among a bu...2018-04-0637 min
OutliersEp 52: Deepak Shenoy on building Capitalmind, and the impending fintech bubble burst in IndiaDeepak Shenoy was one of the early professionals to start algorithmic trading in India, way back in 2009. It required sifting through patterns of data and using software-based decision-making systems to trade and make stock calls.
While I have been following his Twitter handle @deepakshenoy for past couple of years, some of his recent writings have clearly been outliers, especially in terms of fresh perspective and incisive analysis. “How The 11,400 cr. Import Ponzi Scam at PNB Unfolded” published in February is an example of that.
Shenoy, a computer science graduate from the National Institute of Technology, Karnataka, started his career as a co...2018-03-2344 min
OutliersEp 51 : ProductHunt founder Ryan Hoover on life with AngelList and lessons in building communityIn the mad, mad world of tech, discovering the next big thing is a holy grail for everyone – from investors to startup founders looking for their next pivot and even large tech companies hunting for the disruption in their core markets.
From a small email list launched in November 2013 by Ryan Hoover, ProductHunt has now helped discover over 100 million products with more than 100,000 new product launches on its platform.
In this week’s Outliers, we have for you a conversation with Hoover who talks about the ProductHunt journey, its $20 million acquisition by AngelList in 2016, and some deep lessons in building comm...2018-03-1636 min
OutliersEp 50 : Masterclass with Jyoti BansalEvery time we spot a hugely successful entrepreneur (either multi-billion dollar exit or an IPO), there’s a rush to analyse what went behind the success and whether there’s a playbook that can be replicated to create more successful exits for startups. Everyone from investors to existing and wannabe entrepreneurs are looking for “deep insights” that will catapult their idea into the big league.
If you read some of the top learnings shared by Jyoti Bansal and even listen to the entire podcast, I bet you will get a feeling that none of this is something you haven’t heard befo...2018-03-091h 02
OutliersEp 49 : K Vaitheeswaran on why a startup is the second important thing in life. First is familyK Vaitheeswaran’s entrepreneurial journey lacks all the fanfare, glory and gyaan that make some of the most visible startup journeys of today, including Flipkart and Ola. It’s a story that underscores how lonely it’s to be a startup founder and how ugly the lows in the journey can get.
On the midnight of December 31, 2012, Vaitheeswaran opened the door of his house to find a bunch of drunk and abusive guys demanding monies his company Indiaplaza owed to several vendors.
“One of the reasons we all enjoy December 31 and look forward to January is because we believe it’s going to...2018-02-0936 min
OutliersEp 48 : Avani Parekh of SnapChat service LoveDoctor on pre-teen sex counsellingThe first time I heard of LoveDoctor, a SnapChat-based counselling service for teenagers, women and even pre-teen kids seeking sex advice, I was blown away. Not just because it’s rare to find a savvy SnapChat user in my peer group, but the whole idea of serving such a real world need, unaddressed largely, fascinated me.
Few days ago, I emailed Avani Parekh asking for updates about LoveDoctor and checking if she would help me explore a deeper narrative on its evolution and the road ahead.
“Well, it’s not alive anymore,” she told me. Parekh who joined Sheroes last year, is...2018-02-0236 min
OutliersEp 47: Anand Deshpande of Persistent on employee vs founder mindsetAnand Deshpande, 55, and the founder of Pune-based Persistent Systems has been an outlier for nearly three decades. Since he founded Persistent in 1990, he has watched lucrative opportunities in low-end software services come and go across different cycles. Over years, he’s steered Persistent away from low-end outsourcing business towards high-end software product development work for the likes of IBM and so on.
With revenues of nearly $500 million in 2017, it’s been a long, slow journey for Persistent and Deshpande, a former Hewlett Packard engineer.
“It’s not so much about founders. What everybody needs to learn is how to delegate, and that...2018-01-1241 min
OutliersEp 46: Bhumika Goyal on what it’s like being a top open source contributorWelcome to the Season 2 of the Outliers Podcast.
We start the year with a conversation with Bhumika Goyal, a 22-year old computer science graduate with a passion for the Free and Open Source Software movement (FOSS), and is already among the top-ranked Linux Kernel contributors.
In a year when a lot of talk is going to be focused on job losses in the country’s over $100 billion IT sector, Goyal’s choice of career and passion for Open Source does appear brave.
“I just love the way the open source community collaborates across different geographies and cultures, demographics,” she tells me. “Whi...2018-01-0526 min
OutliersOutliers Season 1 Finale: Vijay Shekhar Sharma on the life of a founderSo who is Vijay Shekhar Sharma?
Depending who you ask in India’s technology and startup ecosystem, the answers will range from “that crazy guy” to “overly obsessed entrepreneur”, “trying to fight too many battles at the same time”, “a desi entrepreneur”, “rags to riches story” and so on.
If you ask us at FactorDaily, we’ll perhaps point you to our Code of Conduct that names him as one of the three investors backing our media startup.
But this podcast isn’t about what we think of him; it’s about who he really is.
And as I sat down with him for this speci...2017-12-2525 min
OutliersEp 45: Kiran Mazumdar-Shaw on handling criticism and trollsWith over a million Twitter followers and hundreds of thousands on other social platforms, Kiran Mazumdar Shaw keeps a really visible and busy profile. This fan following also brings trolls and critics who can get really personal at times.
As I sat down with Shaw, the founder of India’s biggest biotech company, Biocon, to record the last Outliers podcast of 2017, I asked her how she manages criticism and trolls.
“From the very start I’ve faced criticism…..being a woman entrepreneur, and trying to build a startup in an area not understood by many,” she told me. “More recently, some retail...2017-12-2231 min
OutliersEp 44: How Rohith Bhat built an app development powerhouse from small town India“When Steve Jobs went on the stage in 2008 to announce the App Store, he showed the first 500 apps, and the five of them were built in this building, in Udupi,” Rohith Bhat, founder of Robosoft tells me as I sat down to record this episode of Outliers in Udupi, a small temple town located some 400 kilometres from Bangalore.
What’s really exciting about Bhat’s journey is not just having Apple as an old, loyal customer, but how he is transforming Robosoft into a next-generation company that’s now building new gaming apps too. The Star Chef game, for instance, has been d...2017-12-1542 min
OutliersEp 43: Santhanalakshmi Arvind on what it takes to be the family of a startup founderMuch before startup ideas find their way to colourful pitch decks, the founders, at least the ones with families, seek some kind of emotional, social approval. That approval is not make or break, but important.
Who gives that approval? More often than not: the founder’s family: parents or/and spouses. They, of course, almost instantly give their approval because they see the startup dream painted all over the founder’s face — the starry-eyed look of a wannabe founder wanting to change the world.
And that’s where it all starts: the long, slow, painful and lonely journey of entrepreneurship.
The life...2017-12-0828 min
OutliersEp 42: Viral B. Shah on why engineers need empathy about usersThe American civil aviation regulator’s next-generation collision avoidance system is built on a relatively new programing language called Julia.
You can thank Viral, who along with Alan Edelman, Jeff Bezanson, Stefan Karpinski, Keno Fischer and Deepak Vinchhi, built the language the next time you have a safe flight in the U.S. airspace.
Like every profession, engineering is also defined by some awesome coders and architects who are known for the battles they pick and the ones they ignore.
Shah, who was one of the key architects behind Aadhaar payments system, prefers to stay away from the controversies surrounding In...2017-12-0154 min
OutliersEp 41: Vishwas Chitale on the dairy of the futureThe first time I heard of Chitale Dairy was about eight years ago when an executive at one of the top Indian retailers asked me to check out how a dairy in Maharashtra’s Sangli village was using radio frequency tags to track cattle. Back then, most RFID deployments at retailers were bleeding and not delivering on early promises.
The dairy, I was told, was using intelligent tracking among other technologies to ensure its annual milk productivity was double the national average.
Earlier this month, I traveled again to Sangli to see how far has Chitale Dairy has progressed with te...2017-11-2429 min
OutliersEp 40: Why R A Mashelkar remains “dangerously optimistic”At 74, Raghunath Anant Mashelkar has spent decades in setting India’s innovation agenda across organizations including the National Innovation Foundation and Council of Scientific and Industrial Research. Now, he’s the chairman of Reliance Industries’ innovation council.
As I sat down with Mashelkar for this week’s Outliers Podcast, I was fresh from the last episode about how India failed it’s homegrown hardware innovation such as Simputer. Mashelkar responded by saying that getting the government to become a customer for their products is indeed a challenge for smaller, disruptive startups.
“It’s interesting because exactly 48 hours ago I sent a paper to the...2017-11-1746 min
OutliersEp 39: Devi Shetty on why he’s obsessed with affordable healthcareDr Devi Shetty of Narayana Health is more a pioneer and a disrupter than an Outlier. Shetty, who is widely credited with disrupting India’s healthcare scene with affordable surgeries, is shaping the future of healthcare in the country, too.
And while he’s doing all that, he is relentlessly exploring new technologies from 3D printing to artificial intelligence and intelligent software algorithms for delivering more efficient and intelligent healthcare services. At the core of his hospital business is an assembly line approach he has adopted across his hospitals,
“In 5-10 years from now, it will become legally mandatory for doctor...2017-11-1013 min
OutliersEp 38: V Vinay on whether Simputer was a success or a failureThe most significant innovation in computer technology in 2001 was not Apple's gleaming titanium PowerBook G4 or Microsoft's Windows XP. It was the Simputer. This is computing as it would have looked if Gandhi had invented it, then used Steve Jobs for his ad campaign.
Source: Bruce Sterling in a The New York Times article published December 2001
Was Simputer ahead of time?
Was it a failure or success? Depending who you ask, the answers can be as varied as possible.
To understand what happened with what the NY Times once described as the product of the year, I decided to sit...2017-11-0354 min
Digital IndiaGOOGLE’S NEXT BILLION AMBITION IN INDIAIn this weeks show we talk about Google’s Next Billion ambition in India. We discussed about Google products in India, their Next Billion Ambition, Board meetings, India specific Products such as Tez, you Tube Offline, You Tube Go, Rail Wire.
The 125th episode of Digital India Podcast on FIR Podcast Network is brought to you by staff and students of Web Marketing Academy
How Google localized products, Language support,Google Map, Adwords, Android, Voice Search for Local language. AI – Local Language feature
Freedom to work within the organization, Google Ma...2017-10-311h 12
OutliersEp 37:Computing pioneer Bob Frankston says algorithms are the new bureaucracy“When you see a door, you should get curious,” says Robert M. “Bob” Frankston, a computing pioneer who co-developed VisiCalc, a spreadsheet program with Dan Bricklin way back in 1979. We are discussing the engineering crisis and what should a young programmer do to stay relevant.
“I hate the word coding; it’s like calling writing, typing.”
As I sat with Bob for this episode of Outliers Podcast, we discussed everything from the future of computer programming to how algorithms and their masters such as Facebook, Google and Amazon are beginning to take control of our lives.
“Algorithms are the new bureaucracy.”2017-10-0626 min
OutliersEp 36: Dr Anil Gupta on what entrepreneurs must learn from grassroots innovatorsMany of you on the internet might know Professor Anil Gupta from his Ted Talk. But the work he does has far-reaching impact on grassroots innovation. Dr Gupta, a renowned scholar of grassroots innovations, founded Honeybee Networks many years ago with a simple mission: knowledge must benefit the people it comes from.
His grouse with academics, who would often get insights from "knowledge rich and economically poor" people but fail to acknowledge or design solutions that would circle back to the poor, became the bedrock on which Honeybee Networks was founded.
In this podcast, recorded in Ahmedabad in peak Navratri...2017-09-2935 min
OutliersEp 35: Wingify’s Paras Chopra on bootstrapping his startup from zero to $18m revenueThere's something fascinating about the entrepreneurs who stay away from the VC funding frenzy and quietly build their startups one baby step at a time.
Doing a startup overall is a crazy, bold thing to do, in the first place. The odds are stacked against you. On top of that, if the entrepreneur decides to bootstrap his or her startup, there is only one word for the journey: brutal. Aggressive, highly funded and ruthless rivals breathe down the neck. They poach your most treasured talent nurtured over long years.
In this episode of Outliers, I sat down with Paras to...2017-09-2241 min
OutliersEp 34: Ashish Sinha on Indian startups’ underbelly and going back to his product rootsDepending on who you ask in the Indian startup ecosystem, Ashish Sinha, an IIT, IIM graduate and a former Yahoo product manager, could have built an AngelList to a TechCrunch equivalent from this part of the world. For his part, he did try attempting doing these. And he failed. Not for any lack of network or the knowhow, but because he did not agree with the rules of the game.
Since Sinha quit his Yahoo job in May 2009, Shradha Sharma has built and scaled startup news site www.YourStory.com to be India’s biggest media platform for entrepreneurs, and An...2017-09-1545 minDigital India118 : WHATSAPP FOR BUSINESS IN INDIA – A GAME CHANGER ?WHATSAPP FOR BUSINESS :
Biggest development of 2017
Released by Techcruch Article
Reported in India by Factordaily
200 million active users in India
The 118th episode of Digital India Podcast on FIR Podcast Network is brought to you by staff and students of Web Marketing Academy
Amazon 22,000 seasonal job opportunities in India for festive seasons.
Google launches new feed to personalise search engines. ( Language in English – Hindi) (Collection of cards) (Search history feeds, Location feeds, following feeds etc)
Elevate India 2017, A women only conference .
BETA VERSION ( GOOGLE SEARCH CONSOLE)
Google search console
Communication
Targeting options
Language
Crawl
Mobile Friendly
Site S...2017-09-1330 min